How We Learned Not To Care About America’s Wars

By Andrew J. Bacevich, TomDispatch, Oct. 9, 2017

Consider, if you will, these two indisputable facts. First, the United States is today more or less permanently engaged in hostilities in not one faraway place, but at least seven. Second, the vast majority of the American people could not care less.

Nor can it be said that we don’t care because we don’t know. True, government authorities withhold certain aspects of ongoing military operations or release only details that they find convenient. Yet information describing what U.S. forces are doing (and where) is readily available, even if buried in recent months by barrages of presidential tweets. Here, for anyone interested, are press releases issued by United States Central Command for just one recent week:

September 19: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq

September 20: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq

Iraqi Security Forces begin Hawijah offensive

September 21: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq

September 22: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq

September 23: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq

Operation Inherent Resolve Casualty

September 25: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq

September 26: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq

Ever since the United States launched its war on terror, oceans of military press releases have poured forth. And those are just for starters. To provide updates on the U.S. military’s various ongoing campaigns, generals, admirals, and high-ranking defense officials regularly testify before congressional committees or brief members of the press. From the field, journalists offer updates that fill in at least some of the details–on civilian casualties, for example–that government authorities prefer not to disclose. Contributors to newspaper op-ed pages and “experts” booked by network and cable TV news shows, including passels of retired military officers, provide analysis. Trailing behind come books and documentaries that put things in a broader perspective.

But here’s the truth of it. None of it matters.

Like traffic jams or robocalls, war has fallen into the category of things that Americans may not welcome, but have learned to live with. In twenty-first-century America, war is not that big a deal.

While serving as defense secretary in the 1960s, Robert McNamara once mused that the “greatest contribution” of the Vietnam War might have been to make it possible for the United States “to go to war without the necessity of arousing the public ire.” With regard to the conflict once widely referred to as McNamara’s War, his claim proved grotesquely premature. Yet a half-century later, his wish has become reality.

Why do Americans today show so little interest in the wars waged in their name and at least nominally on their behalf? Why, as our wars drag on and on, doesn’t the disparity between effort expended and benefits accrued arouse more than passing curiosity or mild expressions of dismay? Why, in short, don’t we give a [expletive deleted]?

Perhaps just posing such a question propels us instantly into the realm of the unanswerable, like trying to figure out why people idolize Justin Bieber, shoot birds, or watch golf on television.

Without any expectation of actually piercing our collective ennui, let me take a stab at explaining why we don’t give a @#$%&! Here are eight distinctive but mutually reinforcing explanations, offered in a sequence that begins with the blindingly obvious and ends with the more speculative.

Americans don’t attend all that much to ongoing American wars because:

1. U.S. casualty rates are low. By using proxies and contractors, and relying heavily on airpower, America’s war managers have been able to keep a tight lid on the number of U.S. troops being killed and wounded. In all of 2017, for example, a grand total of 11 American soldiers have been lost in Afghanistan–about equal to the number of shooting deaths in Chicago over the course of a typical week. True, in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other countries where the U.S. is engaged in hostilities, whether directly or indirectly, plenty of people who are not Americans are being killed and maimed. (The estimated number of Iraqi civilians killed this year alone exceeds 12,000.) But those casualties have next to no political salience as far as the United States is concerned. As long as they don’t impede U.S. military operations, they literally don’t count (and generally aren’t counted).

2. The true costs of Washington’s wars go untabulated. In a famous speech, dating from early in his presidency, Dwight D. Eisenhower said that “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” Dollars spent on weaponry, Ike insisted, translated directly into schools, hospitals, homes, highways, and power plants that would go unbuilt. “This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense,” he continued. “[I]t is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.” More than six decades later, Americans have long since accommodated themselves to that cross of iron. Many actually see it as a boon, a source of corporate profits, jobs, and, of course, campaign contributions. As such, they avert their eyes from the opportunity costs of our never-ending wars. The dollars expended pursuant to our post-9/11 conflicts will ultimately number in the multi-trillions. Imagine the benefits of investing such sums in upgrading the nation’s aging infrastructure. Yet don’t count on Congressional leaders, other politicians, or just about anyone else to pursue that connection.

3. On matters related to war, American citizens have opted out. Others have made the point so frequently that it’s the equivalent of hearing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” at Christmastime. Even so, it bears repeating: the American people have defined their obligation to “support the troops” in the narrowest imaginable terms, ensuring above all that such support requires absolutely no sacrifice on their part. Members of Congress abet this civic apathy, while also taking steps to insulate themselves from responsibility. In effect, citizens and their elected representatives in Washington agree: supporting the troops means deferring to the commander in chief, without inquiring about whether what he has the troops doing makes the slightest sense. Yes, we set down our beers long enough to applaud those in uniform and boo those who decline to participate in mandatory rituals of patriotism. What we don’t do is demand anything remotely approximating actual accountability.

4. Terrorism gets hyped and hyped and hyped some more. While international terrorism isn’t a trivial problem (and wasn’t for decades before 9/11), it comes nowhere close to posing an existential threat to the United States. Indeed, other threats, notably the impact of climate change, constitute a far greater danger to the wellbeing of Americans. Worried about the safety of your children or grandchildren? The opioid epidemic constitutes an infinitely greater danger than “Islamic radicalism.” Yet having been sold a bill of goods about a “war on terror” that is essential for “keeping America safe,” mere citizens are easily persuaded that scattering U.S. troops throughout the Islamic world while dropping bombs on designated evildoers is helping win the former while guaranteeing the latter. To question that proposition becomes tantamount to suggesting that God might not have given Moses two stone tablets after all.

5. Blather crowds out substance. When it comes to foreign policy, American public discourse is–not to put too fine a point on it–vacuous, insipid, and mindlessly repetitive. William Safire of the New York Times once characterized American political rhetoric as BOMFOG, with those running for high office relentlessly touting the Brotherhood of Man and the Fatherhood of God. Ask a politician, Republican or Democrat, to expound on this country’s role in the world, and then brace yourself for some variant of WOSFAD, as the speaker insists that it is incumbent upon the World’s Only Superpower to spread Freedom and Democracy. Terms like leadership and indispensable are introduced, along with warnings about the dangers of isolationism and appeasement, embellished with ominous references to Munich. Such grandiose posturing makes it unnecessary to probe too deeply into the actual origins and purposes of American wars, past or present, or assess the likelihood of ongoing wars ending in some approximation of actual success. Cheerleading displaces serious thought.

6. Besides, we’re too busy. Think of this as a corollary to point five. Even if the present-day American political scene included figures like Senators Robert La Follette or J. William Fulbright, who long ago warned against the dangers of militarizing U.S. policy, Americans may not retain a capacity to attend to such critiques. Responding to the demands of the Information Age is not, it turns out, conducive to deep reflection. We live in an era (so we are told) when frantic multitasking has become a sort of duty and when being overscheduled is almost obligatory. Our attention span shrinks and with it our time horizon. The matters we attend to are those that happened just hours or minutes ago. Yet like the great solar eclipse of 2017–hugely significant and instantly forgotten–those matters will, within another few minutes or hours, be superseded by some other development that briefly captures our attention. As a result, a dwindling number of Americans–those not compulsively checking Facebook pages and Twitter accounts–have the time or inclination to ponder questions like: When will the Afghanistan War end? Why has it lasted almost 16 years? Why doesn’t the finest fighting force in history actually win? Can’t package an answer in 140 characters or a 30-second made-for-TV sound bite? Well, then, slowpoke, don’t expect anyone to attend to what you have to say.

7. Anyway, the next president will save us. At regular intervals, Americans indulge in the fantasy that, if we just install the right person in the White House, all will be well. Ambitious politicians are quick to exploit this expectation. Presidential candidates struggle to differentiate themselves from their competitors, but all of them promise in one way or another to wipe the slate clean and Make America Great Again. Ignoring the historical record of promises broken or unfulfilled, and presidents who turn out not to be deities but flawed human beings, Americans–members of the media above all–pretend to take all this seriously. Campaigns become longer, more expensive, more circus-like, and ever less substantial. One might think that the election of Donald Trump would prompt a downward revision in the exalted expectations of presidents putting things right. Instead, especially in the anti-Trump camp, getting rid of Trump himself (Collusion! Corruption! Obstruction! Impeachment!) has become the overriding imperative, with little attention given to restoring the balance intended by the framers of the Constitution. The irony of Trump perpetuating wars that he once roundly criticized and then handing the conduct of those wars to generals devoid of ideas for ending them almost entirely escapes notice.

8. Our culturally progressive military has largely immunized itself from criticism. Put simply, critics who in an earlier day might have blasted military leaders for their inability to bring wars to a successful conclusion hold their fire. Having women graduate from Ranger School or command Marines in combat more than compensates for not winning.

A collective indifference to war has become an emblem of contemporary America. But don’t expect your neighbors down the street or the editors of the New York Times to lose any sleep over that fact. Even to notice it would require them–and us–to care.

Read More

The Stone Poneys - Different Drum 1967

Read More

If you exercise a lot, you probably think your heart is in good shape. Maybe not.

By Emily Sohn, Washington Post, October 7, 2017

Jason Lathrop was training for a solo backpacking trip in 2015 when he started to feel a creaking sensation in his knees during morning runs near his home in Portland, Ore.

Expecting to learn that he’d torn his meniscus or strained a ligament, he went to his doctor, who told him his knees were just fine. Instead, he learned, he had a heart murmur. Six weeks later, the 43-year-old father of two was undergoing open-heart surgery to repair a faulty mitral valve.

After a lifetime of active and virtuous living that including frequent exercise, healthy eating and no smoking, Lathrop was stunned to learn that something could be wrong with his heart.

“Your heart is your aerobic engine along with your lungs, and I thought if there were any organs I would not have problems with, it would be those two because I took such good care of them,” says Lathrop, an analyst at Intel. “It was such a shock.”

Exercise does a lot to strengthen the heart and lengthen lives, experts say. But heart problems are still common–and sometimes dramatic–in active people. It’s a point that’s likely to come up during this fall’s marathon season, given the cases of sudden cardiac death and heart attacks that sometimes occur during long races.

Those rare but often highly publicized events offer an opportunity to deliver a nuanced message about heart health to active people: Exercise is good, but nothing is 100 percent protective, says Aaron Baggish, director of the Cardiovascular Performance Program at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

“No amount of exercise confers complete immunity to heart disease,” Baggish says. “You can’t outrun heart problems completely.”

Decades of research on tens of thousands of people have drawn a direct connection between routine exercise and heart health. Among other measures, studies show, getting the recommended 150 minutes of moderate exercise each week can lower rates of blood pressure, heart disease, death and more.

“If you had to pick one pill for the American public to take, exercise is more perfect than any other pill you could come up with,” says Mark Link, a cardiac electrophysiologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.

But reducing risk isn’t the same as eliminating it. Sometimes exercise can exacerbate heart risks, especially at extreme levels–although scientists are still working out the details of what an athlete’s heart should look like.

In one 2013 study, researchers looked at the health records of more than 52,000 Swedish cross-country skiers who competed in a 56-mile race between 1989 and 1998. They found that male athletes who had skied faster and those who had competed in more races showed higher rates of irregular heart rhythms, called arrhythmias, over a period of 10 years.

Compared with men who had competed just once, those who completed five races were twice as likely to be hospitalized for bradyarrhythmias, or unusually slow heart rates. Atrial fibrillation, an irregular or very fast heart rate, was also more common in the most-serious skiers.

But overall, the athletes reaped plenty of benefits. Rates of death were lower in skiers who did more races compared with those who did fewer. Mortality rates were lower in the skiers compared with the general population.

This is not the only example where evidence is revealing that vigorous training alters hearts in ways that require more research. For example, serious athletes seem to show increased levels of calcium deposits in the arteries of the heart. These plaques are normally a sign of elevated risk for heart attacks, but new studies suggest that they may be less worrisome in otherwise healthy athletes. “To some degree,” Baggish says, “the jury is still out on this.”

A more common risk that active people face is the belief that exercise gives them freedom to indulge in heart-damaging behaviors. And excessive alcohol, junk food and tobacco in early adulthood can catch up to people later in life, Baggish says.

Genetic predispositions also matter, even for people who do everything right. That’s something that Jay Kuo, a 49-year-old Broadway composer and producer in New York, has been struggling with since his blood pressure and triglycerides spiked a couple of years ago, despite his healthy habits.

Already spooked by a family history of heart disease, including the death of his father at age 44, Kuo had stopped smoking, reduced his salt intake, cut out processed meats and started drinking a kale smoothie every morning. He also jogs, does yoga, meditates and takes medications to improve his blood pressure and triglyceride levels. Despite all that, he’s not making as much progress as he’d like.

“It’s frustrating,” he says. “I need to not have what happened to my dad happen to me.”

Screening for heart conditions remains controversial, as researchers continue to debate whether looking for trouble would wind up harming more people than it might help.

See a doctor if you have concerns, Baggish suggests. But don’t let stories of athletes with heart problems scare you away from exercise.

“Our country’s problem is not too much exercise,” he says. “It’s too little exercise.”

And a diagnosis doesn’t have to mean the end of an athletic lifestyle. Two years after his heart surgery, Lathrop is running three days a week, often for 10 miles or more at a time.

“I’m running much farther than I ever did before the surgery,” he says. “I have a new lease on life.”

Read More

How to Actually Get Rest

By Brad Stulberg, New York Magazine, Oct. 4, 2017

The thing about scrolling through social media is that it often feels like it should be a restful activity. It even looks like one. You’re barely moving, after all; you might even be lying down. And yet when is the last time you closed Twitter feeling refreshed?

In case you haven’t yet heard, rest is important. It’s when our bodies repair and grow; our brains become smarter and more creative; and our minds replenish willpower and gain emotional control. Rest is so important to working in a happy, healthy, and sustainable manner that we’d be wise to think of it not as something separate from doing good work, but rather, as an integral part of doing good work; sometimes, not working is the work.

But there is a science–and art–to resting well, and not all forms of kicking back are created equal. It turns out that lots of the activities we think are restful may actually leave us feeling more tired and stressed.

Before we get into the best ways to rest, it’s instructive to agree on a common definition of what rest even is. Most researchers agree that rest is a physiological state during which your innate fight-or-flight stress response, or sympathetic nervous system, subsides in favor of a more relaxed condition. Your heart rate and blood pressure come down, and your shoulders usually follow. Psychologically, rest is considered a shift from deliberate and effortful thinking–for example, straining to solve a problem or trying to figure out the best way to communicate a complex topic–to a more passive state, sometimes characterized by mind-wandering or zoning out.

While both “stress” and “rest” are somewhat subjective–a five-mile run might be a restful activity for one person and a stressful one for another–there are a few ingredients that are essential to any truly restful activity.

You aren’t exerting self-control. At first, it might take some willpower to resist worrying about work or other seemingly pressing issues, but once you’re in the midst of a nice bout of rest, it should feel pretty easy. Trying really hard to rest–for example, forcing yourself to listen to music and breathe deeply when all you really want to do is respond to emails–defeats its purpose. Either find an activity that more easily lets your mind drift away (more on that below), or just respond to the emails and try relaxing afterwards.

You aren’t consciously thinking about your work or other issues that may be weighing on you. Perhaps your subconscious mind is still connecting dots and problem solving in the background, but your conscious awareness is not on your work–instead, it’s floating freely. Likewise, a restful activity can’t be one that’s triggering anxiety. (See: cable news or a polarizing Twitter feed.)

You aren’t disrupting your ability to fall and remain asleep, which is the ultimate form of rest. As for two of the developed world’s favorite evening activities: If watching television (though not the news) allows you to check out, and doesn’t interfere with your falling asleep, then by all means go for it. Same goes for a glass of wine. But beware: Studies show that if consumed within a few hours prior to bed, both can interfere with sleep–the culprits being blue light from the former and alcohol from the latter. If you are struggling to fall or stay asleep, it’s probably best to eliminate late-night TV and your nightcap.

Plenty of activities meet the above criteria for rest, but a few in particular come with strong evidence of benefits.

Walking: In a study aptly titled “Give Your Ideas Some Legs,” researchers from Stanford University found that individuals who took a short (6 to 15 minute) walking break increased creative thinking by 40 to 60 percent, as compared to those who remained seated at a desk. At first, they speculated that increased blood flow to the brain was the primary reason for walking’s benefits. But it appears the benefits might also emerge from the interplay between walking and attention: mainly, walking requires just enough coordination to occupy the parts of the brain responsible for effortful thinking, allowing us to more easily zone out and mind-wander, both of which are associated with creativity and insight.

Hanging out with friends. The ratio of the hormones testosterone to cortisol acts as a good indicator of stress and recovery. Testosterone is associated with growth and rejuvenation whereas cortisol is associated with stress and degradation–so the higher the ratio, the better. Studies have found that following stressful periods–like a competitive sporting event, for example–individuals who kick back and relax with friends experience a much quicker rebound in their testosterone to cortisol ratio. Other research shows that social connection helps to shift the nervous system into a restful state and releases hormones that have anti-inflammatory properties, like oxytocin and vasopressin.

Experiencing nature. Time spent in nature is associated with more relaxed physiological and psychological states–even just looking at pictures of natural settings for a few minutes has been shown to increase creative thinking. Writing in her book The Nature Fix, Florence Williams suggests that “nature lulls us with soft fascination, helping to rest our top-down, direct attention faculties.”

Hiking. Combine the above three strategies! Group forest walks have been found to decrease stress hormones and attenuate virtually every part of the fight-or-flight stress response. For the full effect, leave your smartphone behind (or at least keep it turned off if you feel the need to bring it). I’ve never met anyone who regretted a digital-device-free hike with friends.

Sleeping! The obvious one, but still: No form of rest is as powerful. During sleep, your body repairs and grows and your mind retains, consolidates, and connects the information that you were exposed to during the day. Short naps (10 to 30 minutes) can give you a boost in energy and creativity, but nothing can replace the massive importance of sleeping seven to nine hours every night. Put simply: Sleep is one of the most productive things you can do.

When it comes to how much you should rest, though there are no straightforward guidelines, a good rule of thumb is to balance stress with rest. The more stress in your life, the more you should offset it with rest. Another good way to think about rest is to mimic “interval” training throughout your days, by alternating between bursts of intense, deep-focus work and short breaks.

If you want to prioritize rest (and you should!), be careful not to fall for a common trap, one that leaves many well-intentioned people believing they’re resting but never feeling too well-rested. The activities that may seem like rest are often far from it. Trade in couch time and screens for walking, nature, mind-wandering, and hanging out with friends. Doing so may seem hard at first, but once you get going, you’ll feel a lot better.

Read More

Trump Says Giving Peace a Chance Before U.S. Embassy Move to Jerusalem: Interview

(Reuters) President Donald Trump said in an interview broadcast on Saturday that he wanted to give a shot at achieving peace between Israel and the Palestinians before moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Dennis Edwards: Good news. Moving the embassy to Jerusalem could have a very strong reaction from the international community and the Arab nations. It would be a sign that the US has forgotten the two-state solution completely, though that may in fact be the US position behind closed doors. The United Nations has stood for a two-state solution for many years, at least since resolution 242 back in 1967. Wikipedia gives us some of the details: 

The resolution was sponsored by British ambassador Lord Caradon and was one of five drafts under consideration. The preamble refers to the "inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and the need to work for a just and lasting peace in the Middle East in which every State in the area can live in security."

Operative Paragraph One "Affirms that the fulfillment of Charter principles requires the establishment of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East which should include the application of both the following principles:(i) Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict;(ii) Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force."[1]

Bible prophecy seems to indicate that the situation in the Middle East will one day blow up in the face of the whole world. Some eschatology experts believe that a "Holy Covenant" will bring some sort of peaceful solution to the present Israeli/Palestinian tension, even allowing Israel to build its Third Temple on or near to the Temple Mount. However, if understood correctly, the prophecies seem to show that peace will be short lived, a period of 3 and 1/2 years, followed by a period often called "the Great Tribulation," also 3 and 1/2 years. This 7 years is often referred to as the last 7 years and ends with the famous Battle of Armageddon.

All that to say, it's important to keep your eyes on the Middle East situation as it seems to be the tinderbox that will light the world in the very last days of man's autonomous governments. Trump's decision to not push to have the US embassy in Jerusalem could very well mean we have more time. But slowly, and surely things are moving in the direction predicted by God's prophets hundreds of years ago.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Council_Resolution_242

Read More

Science tells us this is all true!

On April 30, 1934, under pressure from Italian-American lobby groups, the United States Congress passed a law enshrining Columbus Day as a national holiday. 

President Franklin Roosevelt quickly signed the bill into law, and the very first Columbus Day was celebrated in October of that year. 

Undoubtedly people had a different view of the world back then… and a different set of values. 

Few cared about the plight of the indigenous who were wiped out as a result of European conquest. 

Even just a few decades ago when I was a kid in elementary school, I remember learning that ‘Columbus discovered America’. There was no discussion of genocide. 

It wasn’t until I was a sophomore at West Point that I picked up Howard Zinn’sPeople’s History of the United States (and then Columbus’s own diaries) and started reading about the mass-extermination of entire tribes. 

Columbus himself wrote about his first encounter with the extremely peaceful and welcoming Arawak Indians of the Bahama Islands: 

“They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron...They would make fine servants...With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.” 

And so he did. 

“I took some of the natives by force in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever there is in these parts.” 

Columbus had already written back to his investors in Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella, that the Caribbean islands possessed “great mines of gold.” 

It was all lies. Columbus was desperately attempting to justify their investment.

In Haiti, Columbus ordered the natives to bring him all of their gold. But there was hardly an ounce of gold anywhere on the island. So Columbus had them slaughtered. Within two years, 250,000 were dead. 

Now, this letter isn’t intended to rail against Columbus. Point is, I never learned any of this information in school. Decades ago, no one really did. 

But today, people are starting to be aware of what Columbus did. And our values are vastly different today than they were in 1937. Or in 1492. 

Decades ago... and certainly hundreds of years ago... the idea of a ‘superior race’ still prevailed, endowed by their creator with the right to subjugate all inferior races. 

This readily-accepted belief was the pretext of slavery and genocide. 

Even as recently as the early 1900s, there were entire fields of ‘science’ devoted to studying the technical differences among various races and drawing data-driven conclusions about superiority. 

Phrenologists, for example, would take precise measurements of people’s skulls-- the circumference of the head, the ratio of forehead to eyebrow measurements, etc.-- and deduce the intellectual capacity and character traits of entire races. 

Jews could not be trusted. Blacks and Asians were inferior. These assertions were based on ‘scientific evidence’, even in nations like Sweden, the United Kingdom, and United States. 

Today we’re obviously more advanced than our ancestors were. We know that their science was complete bullshit, and our values are totally different. 

There are entire movements now (particularly among university students) to remove statues, rename buildings, and re-designate holidays. 

Frankly this is a pretty slippery slope. If we judge everyone throughout history based on our values today, we’ll never stop tearing down monuments. 

Even someone as forward-thinking as Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. And that’s a LOT of elementary schools to rename. 

More importantly, there will come a time in the future when our own descendants judge us harshly for our short-sighted values. 

Fortunately we no longer have faux-scientists today writing dissertations about racial superiority. 

But we do have entire fields of ‘science’ that will truly bewilder future historians. Economics is one of them. 

Our society awards some of its most distinguished prizes for intellectual achievement to economists who tell us that the path to prosperity is to print money, raise taxes, and go into debt. 

Economists tell us that we can spend our way out of recession, borrow our way out of debt, and that there will never be any consequences from conjuring trillions of units of paper currency out of thin air. 

They created a central banking system whereby an unelected committee of economists possesses nearly totalitarian control of the money supply… and hence the power to influence the price of EVERYTHING-- food, fuel, housing, utilities, financial markets, etc. 

Economists have managed to convince the world that inflation, i.e. rising prices, is actually a GOOD thing… and that prices quadrupling and quintupling during the average person’s lifespan is ‘normal’. 

They’ve also succeeded in making policy-makers terrified of deflation (falling prices) even though just about any rational individual would naturally prefer falling (or at least stable) prices to rising prices. 

Economists make the most ridiculous assertions, like “The debt doesn’t matter because we owe it to ourselves...” as if it’s perfectly acceptable for the US government to default on its citizens. 

Or that the US economy is so strong because the American consumer spends so much money, i.e. consumption (and not production) drives prosperity. 

The public believes all this nonsense because the ‘scientists’ say it’s true. 

The scientists also come up with fuzzy mathematics to support their assertions. Last Friday, for example, the Labor Department reported that the US economy lost 33,000 jobs in September. 

Yet miraculously the unemployment rate actually declined, i.e. fewer people are unemployed despite there being fewer jobs in the economy. 

None of this makes any sense. Fewer jobs means lower unemployment. Spend more money. Print more money. Borrow more money. Debt is wealth. Consumption is prosperity. 

All of this is based on ‘science’. 

We may rightfully take umbrage with the values and ideas of our ancestors. 

But it’s worth turning that mirror on ourselves and examining our own beliefs… for there will undoubtedly come a time when our own descendants wonder how we could have been so foolish.

To your freedom,


Simon Black
October 9, 2017
Sovereign Valley Farm, Chile

Founder, SovereignMan.com

Read More

God Is the Gospel

“For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: The righteous will live by faith.”—Romans 1:171

Many people are under the impression that the Gospel of God is about acknowledging the fact that we are a sinner and accepting Jesus Christ as our Lord and Saviour so that when our time comes, we will go to heaven. This is wonderfully true, but it is not the Gospel, rather a consequence of the Gospel.

If we look at the Gospel as being about forgiveness and going to heaven as the primary objective, we will not understand what the objective is for today, tomorrow, and every day thereafter. Paul writes a very comprehensive exposition of the Gospel to the Romans, and interestingly never mentions going to heaven. The whole point of the Gospel is that we might be reconciled to God and restored into a right relationship with Him so that the righteousness of God, revealed in His Son, may be appropriated and experienced in our lives.

The righteousness of God is the moral character of God, which includes His love, kindness, compassion, patience and justice. These we respond to in worship and admiration, but it becomes far more personal than that, because the righteousness of God was intended to be intimately connected with the human race. Genesis 1:26 says, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness…” When God created us, we were designed to be a physical and visible moral expression of what God is like. God is love, and we are intended to be loving. God is kind, merciful, and just, which we were created to be.

Propositional truths about God’s righteousness had already been given under the Old Covenant, and the character of God revealed in the Ten Commandments. Under the New Covenant, the righteousness of God is no longer in propositional form, but is written in our hearts by the indwelling of His Spirit that comes to us by faith in Christ. Faith in Christ is not a passive belief, but an active experience of the presence and working of God in our lives. Paul writes, “God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.”2 In Romans 8:16 he says, “The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children.” These are experiential and bring us into a relationship of love and dependency on God.

The Gospel of God is … about the here and now. It is about living every day with faith in Christ and our reconciliation to God with the experience of His working in our lives, so that we may increasingly reflect the image in which we were created.—Charles Price

The final and highest good

“One thing have I asked of the LORD, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and to inquire in his temple.”—Psalm 27:4

Protestants have viewed the doctrine of justification (by grace alone, through faith alone, on the basis of Christ’s blood and righteousness alone, for the glory of God alone, as taught with final authority in Scripture alone) as “the heart of the biblical gospel.” … What does it mean? … What is good about being justified by faith alone? Or more broadly, why is the gospel, which has justification by faith at its heart, good news? Now this question is seldom asked, because being forgiven for our sins and being acquitted in court for capital crimes and being counted righteous before a holy God is so manifestly a happy situation that it seems impertinent to ask, Why is it good news?

But I believe we must emphatically ask this question. … The reason this must be asked is that there are seemingly biblical answers that totally ignore the gift of God himself. A person may answer, “Being forgiven is good news because I don’t want to go to hell.” … Or a person may answer, “I want to go to heaven.” But then we must ask why they want to go to heaven. They might answer, “Because the alternative is painful.” Or “Because my deceased wife is there.” Or “Because there will be a new heaven and a new earth where justice and beauty will finally be everywhere.”

What’s wrong with these answers? It’s true that no one should want to go to hell. … In heaven we will be restored to loved ones who died in Christ, and we will escape the pain of hell and enjoy the justice and the beauty of the new earth. All that is true. So what’s wrong with those answers? What’s wrong with them is that they do not treat God as the final and highest good of the gospel. They do not express a supreme desire to be with God. God was not even mentioned. Only his gifts were mentioned. These gifts are precious. But they are not God. And they are not the gospel if God himself is not cherished as the supreme gift of the gospel. That is, if God is not treasured as the ultimate gift of the gospel, none of his gifts will be gospel, good news. And if God is treasured as the supremely valuable gift of the gospel, then all the other lesser gifts will be enjoyed as well.

Justification is not an end in itself. Neither is the forgiveness of sins or the imputation of righteousness. Neither is escape from hell or entrance into heaven or freedom from disease or liberation from bondage or eternal life or justice or mercy or the beauties of a pain-free world. None of these facets of the gospel-diamond is the chief good or highest goal of the gospel. Only one thing is: seeing and savoring God himself, being changed into the image of his Son so that more and more we delight in and display God’s infinite beauty and worth.—John Piper

[1] NIV
[2] Romans 5:5 NIV

https://anchor.tfionline.com/post/god-gospel/

Read More

Everyone has warned me not to tell you what I am going to tell you...

C. S. Lewis

Everyone has warned me not to tell you what I am going to tell you in this last book. They all say "the ordinary reader does not want Theology; give him plain practical religion." I have rejected their advice. I do not think the ordinary reader is such a fool. Theology means "the science of God," and I think any man who wants to think about God at all would like to have the clearest and most accurate ideas about Him which are available. You are not children: why should you be treated like children?

In a way I quite understand why some people are put off by Theology. I remember once when I had been giving a talk to the R.A.F., an old, hard-bitten officer got up and said, "I've no use for all that stuff. But, mind you, I'm a religious man too. I know there's a God. I've felt Him: out alone in the desert at night: the tremendous mystery. And that's just why I don't believe all your neat little dogmas and formulas about Him. To anyone who's met the real thing they all seem so petty and pedantic and unreal!"

Now in a sense I quite agreed with that man. I think he had probably had a real experience of God in the desert. And when he turned from that experience to the Christian creeds, I think he really was turning from something real to something less real.

In the same way, if a man has once looked at the Atlantic from the beach, and then goes and looks at a map of the Atlantic, he also will be turning from something real to something less real: turning from real waves to a bit of coloured paper. But here comes the point. The map is admittedly only coloured paper, but there are two things you have to remember about it. In the first place, it is based on what hundreds and thousands of people have found out by sailing the real Atlantic. In that way it has behind it masses of experience just as real as the one you could have from the beach; only, while yours would be a single isolated glimpse, the map fits all those different experiences together.

In the second place, if you want to go anywhere, the map is absolutely necessary. As long as you are content with walks on the beach, your own glimpses are far more fun than looking at a map. But the map is going to be more use than walks on the beach if you want to get to America.

Now, Theology is like the map. Merely learning and thinking about the Christian doctrines, if you stop there, is less real and less exciting than the sort of thing my friend got in the desert. Doctrines are not God: they are only a kind of map. But that map is based on the experience of hundreds of people who really were in touch with God—experiences compared with which any thrills or pious feelings you and I are likely to get on our own are very elementary and very confused. And secondly, if you want to get any further, you must use the map.

You see, what happened to that man in the desert may have been real, and was certainly exciting, but nothing comes of it. It leads nowhere. There is nothing to do about it In fact, that is just why a vague religion—all about feeling God in nature, and so on—is so attractive. It is all thrills and no work; like watching the waves from the beach. But you will not get to Newfoundland by studying the Atlantic that way, and you will not get eternal life by simply feeling the presence of God in flowers or music.

Neither will you get anywhere by looking at maps without going to sea. Nor will you be very safe if you go to sea without a map. In other words, Theology is practical: especially now. In the old days, when there was less education and discussion, perhaps it was possible to get on with a very few simple ideas about God. But it is not so now. Everyone reads, everyone hears things discussed. Consequently, if you do not listen to Theology, that will not mean that you have no ideas about God. It will mean that you have a lot of wrong ones—bad, muddled, out-of-date ideas. For a great many of the ideas about God which are trotted out as novelties today, are simply the ones which real Theologians tried centuries ago and rejected. To believe in the popular religion of modern England is retrogression—like believing the earth is flat. 

C S Lewis Mere Christianity

Read More

Comfort in Bereavement

Read More

Jimmy Carter: What I’ve learned from North Korea’s leaders

By Jimmy Carter, Washington Post, October 4, 2017

As the world knows, we face the strong possibility of another Korean war, with potentially devastating consequences to the Korean Peninsula, Japan, our outlying territories in the Pacific and perhaps the mainland of the United States. This is the most serious existing threat to world peace, and it is imperative that Pyongyang and Washington find some way to ease the escalating tension and reach a lasting, peaceful agreement.

Over more than 20 years, I have spent many hours in discussions with top North Korean officials and private citizens during visits to Pyongyang and to the countryside. I found Kim Il Sung (their “Great Leader”), Kim Yong Nam, president of the Presidium of the Supreme People’s Assembly, and other leaders to be both completely rational and dedicated to the preservation of their regime.

What the officials have always demanded is direct talks with the United States, leading to a permanent peace treaty to replace the still-prevailing 1953 cease-fire that has failed to end the Korean conflict. They want an end to sanctions, a guarantee that there will be no military attack on a peaceful North Korea, and eventual normal relations between their country and the international community.

I have visited with people who were starving. Still today, millions suffer from famine and food insecurity and seem to be completely loyal to their top leader. They are probably the most isolated people on Earth and almost unanimously believe that their greatest threat is from a preemptory military attack by the United States.

The top priority of North Korea’s leaders is to preserve their regime and keep it as free as possible from outside control. They are largely immune from influence or pressure from outside. During the time of the current leader, Kim Jong Un, this immunity has also applied to China, whose leaders want to avoid a regime collapse in North Korea or having to contemplate a nuclear-armed Japan or South Korea.

Until now, severe economic sanctions have not prevented North Korea from developing a formidable and dedicated military force, including long-range nuclear missiles, utilizing a surprising level of scientific and technological capability. There is no remaining chance that it will agree to a total denuclearization, as it has seen what happened in a denuclearized Libya and assessed the doubtful status of U.S. adherence to the Iran nuclear agreement.

There have been a number of suggestions for resolving this crisis, including military strikes on North Korea’s nuclear facilities, more severe economic punishment, the forging of a protective nuclear agreement between China and North Korea similar to those between the United States and South Korea and Japan, a real enforcement of the Non- Proliferation Treaty by all nuclear weapons states not to expand their arsenals, and ending annual U.S.-South Korean military exercises.

All of these options are intended to dissuade or deter the leadership of a nation with long-range nuclear weapons–and that believes its existence is threatened–from taking steps to defend itself. None of them offer an immediate way to end the present crisis, because the Pyongyang government believes its survival is at stake. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s statement last week that “we have lines of communications to Pyongyang. We’re not in a dark situation” is a good first step to defusing tensions.

The next step should be for the United States to offer to send a high-level delegation to Pyongyang for peace talks or to support an international conference including North and South Korea, the United States and China, at a mutually acceptable site.

Read More